by Jerry Lewis
I didn’t want any pain at all. And so, after a little while, I tried taking a second pill during the day. Bingo—no more pain! Suddenly, I was head over heels in love with Percodan. It felt like the best thing that had ever happened to me. But I couldn’t help wondering: If two pills made me feel this good, what would happen if I took a third?
I felt even better.
The third pill had nothing to do with pain; it was all about elation. On three Percodans a day, in the mid- to late-sixties, I felt just the way I wanted to feel—a bit larger than life. Buoyant. Optimistic. Funny.
Then, little by little, the third pill wasn’t doing it for me anymore. And so I took a fourth.
By the early seventies, I have to admit, Dean was not the first person on my mind. I knew he and Jeannie had divorced in 1969, and I felt terrible about it. Jeannie and I had had our conflicts—we both loved the same man, after all!—but I still thought she was a great woman. I still think so. To this day, I believe she was the true love of Dean’s life. The relationships he had afterward were all just flings.
But it was hard for me to concentrate on anyone else’s problems but my own. I had a lot going on, and not much of it (with the exception of the Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethons and the film course I taught at USC) was good. For one thing, my son Gary, who’d had a successful recording career himself in the mid-sixties before enlisting in the Army and going to Vietnam, came back from the war a wreck, unable to sleep, unable to erase the horrible images of combat from his mind.
Then, in 1972, Frank Tashlin died. Later that year, my dad had a stroke.
Professionally, things weren’t going much better. The kind of family films I’d been making for a quarter of a century was rapidly going out of style. I was losing my fan base: Kids were staying at home watching television, and a new sort of audience was coming to movie theaters, one that was more in the mood for sex and violence than comedy. Suddenly, I was having trouble financing my pictures. I made a serious Holocaust film called The Day the Clown Cried and lost two million dollars out of my own pocket when my producer skipped town, leaving me unable to finish postproduction. The movie has never been seen. It was like losing a child.
A couple of years earlier, I’d gone into business with a big company called Network Cinema Corporation to start a chain of Jerry Lewis Cinemas around the country. The theaters would only show G-rated pictures. But with the increasing scarcity of that kind of product, the cinemas were running into financial trouble. In 1973, a group of frustrated theater franchisees hit me with a $3 million lawsuit and won.
And then there was Percodan.
By the early seventies, I was up to six of the yellow beauties a day. I’d developed a whole ritual: I would take the first pill in the morning with hot water, believing that the heat and the liquid broke up the medicine and got it into my system faster. On a similar theory, I took the other pills, throughout the day, with Coca-Cola.
The pills kept me going, but there were physical repercussions you wouldn’t even want to hear about, deeply embarrassing things. My marriage was sputtering. I was on a mood roller-coaster, most often headed straight down: When I wasn’t furious, I could be mean as a snake.
On my twenty-ninth wedding anniversary, October 2, 1973, I felt I couldn’t watch the red second hand go around the clock face one more time. I locked myself into my bathroom, took a .38 pistol out of a pad-locked drawer, and stuck the barrel in my mouth. I cocked the hammer. I was ready to go. All the pain, all my troubles, would vanish. I sat there like that for what felt like forever. Then, through the door, I heard my boys, running and playing somewhere off in the house. I took the gun out of my mouth and locked it back in the drawer. I would struggle along somehow.
But there was still plenty of pain to come.
My career was down to two things: the Telethon and personal appearances. While I was on the road, I would often tip a hotel bellboy to come into my room in the morning with a passkey, crush three Percodans in a spoon, and dissolve them in hot water so I could take them and get my day started. I’d lie in bed for twenty minutes until the medicine kicked in, then I’d get up and pop a Dexadrine.
The funny thing was that performing was its own drug. It remains true to this day. No matter how shitty I feel when I get out of bed in the morning, the moment I step onto a stage, the adrenaline takes over. Back then, I would often avoid taking the Percodans before I performed, so my head would stay relatively clear and my timing would be sharper.
After I got off the stage, it was another story.
While I did a number of shows drug-free in those days, there was such a thick haze of Percodan before and after that it’s hard for me to remember them. In fact, I’m ashamed to say that there’s an entire block of MDA Telethons—some four or five years in the mid- and late-seventies—that I have no recollection of whatsoever.
Except one.
I was on stage at the Sahara in Vegas, doing “Telethon ’76,” for the greatest cause on the planet (of course, I’m prejudiced). As I was singing “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” I found myself thinking, Why do I feel something’s about to happen?
I finished the number and introduced Frank Sinatra, who came on to a standing ovation ... just for being there. He sang a couple of songs and stopped the show cold—as he always did. Then Frank and I talked about his healthy grandchildren, and he made a five-thousand-dollar contribution to the Telethon. While I was thanking him, he interrupted, saying, “I have a friend who watches what you do here every year and thinks it’s terrific. I’d like to have him come out.” Frank then yelled, “Hey, send my friend out here, will ya?”
And out walked Dean Martin, my partner, and I was in a time warp. My hands got sweaty, my mouth turned dry. I tried to stand tall as he approached me, and we hugged hard, very hard. He kissed me on the cheek, and I did the same to him. The audience in the theater was going wild! For the first time in twenty years, we stood side by side—as always, Dean stage right, me stage left. “I think it’s about time, don’t you?” Frank said. The two of us nodded yes in tandem. We talked ... a little. I prayed to God for something to say that wouldn’t make me sound like an emotional idiot.
“You workin’?” I finally asked, looking directly into Dean’s eyes.
I wish I could say Dean and I reconnected then and there, but it took a little while. I had to get my own house in order first. My spine pain was like an insatiable monster. I was living in a private world of agony and addiction, and my family saw me—when they saw me—at my worst. I kept those who had been nearest to me at the greatest distance, and some permanent emotional scars formed. My long-suffering wife suffered the most. My boys came a close second.
Meanwhile, I traveled around the world, not just performing but also seeking out doctors of every description, trying to find one who could bring me some relief. A famous surgeon said he’d be glad to operate on me, but that there was a good chance I’d get worse instead of better after the procedure, and a 50 percent chance that I’d be paralyzed for life. I’ve always liked to gamble, but I didn’t like those odds.
Friendship is priceless.
It seemed as though there was no way out. I don’t even like to think about the desperation I was feeling by 1978, when I was up to thirteen Percodans a day. Even hardened survivors of drug addiction get wide-eyed when they hear that number. My self-medication was a full-out assault on my internal organs.
Then fate stepped in, with a little sleight of hand. I’ve always liked magic tricks—the key is getting the audience to look one place while the trick happens somewhere else. It was a bit like that in my case: God played a card trick.
One night at the end of September, I was at the Sahara in Vegas, talking with the hotel’s music director, my pal Jack Eglash. Jack had always suffered from migraines, but that night he had a particularly incapacitating one. I got an idea. “Well, Jack,” I told him, “you should have a specialist check you out. As a matter of fact, there’s a top medical team
at Methodist Hospital in Houston. I can call and make the arrangements.”
“Forget it,” Jack said. “I’m scared to death of doctors. And hospitals.”
But I’m a stubborn SOB, and for whatever reason, Jack’s case got me going. The next day, I phoned the world-famous heart surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey at Methodist Hospital. Michael had been a member of the MDA Scientific Advisory Committee since 1970, and over that time he’d also become my best friend. I talked with him at length about Jack’s condition, and Michael felt he ought to be seen. I had a room set aside for him at the hospital.
Jack dug his heels in. “I’m sorry, Jerry. I can’t do it. I’m not going.”
“Jack, Dr. DeBakey has a team of specialists waiting. Don’t be a baby. I’ll take you there myself.”
We were in Houston the next day. Jack was in his hospital room, getting a workup, and Michael DeBakey, his assistant, and I were headed down the hall to see him when I keeled over.
I came to in a hospital bed just a few doors down from Jack. Dr. DeBakey thought I’d had a heart attack—the pain in my stomach and chest was excruciating—but tests soon ruled out a coronary. When they X-rayed me, they found an ulcer the size of a lemon in my abdomen. The Percodan had masked the pain as the ulcer grew. Michael said that if it had remained undetected, I probably would have bled to death in two weeks.
Jack went home, but I stayed. When Michael sat down and talked to me about my condition, I fessed up about my addiction. He knew I’d been taking Percodan, but he’d thought it was two or three pills a day. When he heard what I’d actually been swallowing, he knew we had two goals: to eliminate the ulcer, and to kill the monkey on my back. Dr. DeBakey put me under heavy sedation, with a drip feeding me liquid nourishment, and gave me periodic steroid injections for the spinal pain. I lived in a twilight state for the next ten days as my blood circulated through an instrument and came back clean. When I woke up, my ulcer was gone and so was my addiction.
There was one important thing, Michael DeBakey told me: Coke and Percodan, he explained, were the same to me as coffee and cigarettes were to many smokers—inextricably bound, one triggering the need for the other. I must never let Coca-Cola pass my lips again. My dentist was delighted.
The following year, I was able to go back to moviemaking for the first time in almost a decade. The picture was called Hardly Working. We shot it in Florida, and the whole experience was a very mixed bag. I directed, cowrote, and starred, and I have to admit that the awful strain of the past ten years showed in every part of my work. The movie didn’t really hang together, and not so surprisingly, I looked terrible in it.
Still, Hardly Working had some good moments onscreen and off. When the film was released in Europe, it turned out that audiences had missed me: They bought $25 million worth of tickets. And once we were finally able to get a distributor in the States (it wasn’t easy, because of how long it had been since my last picture), the critics, who had a field day putting the movie down, were amazed to see it sell.
But the best thing that came out of Hardly Working was a little scene I did with a fresh-faced young dancer from North Carolina named Sandra Pitnick, nicknamed SanDee, or Sam. Out of that scene came a friendship, from that friendship came a relationship, and from that relationship came a new life. After Patti and I made the agonizing decision to bring our long and difficult marriage to an end, Sam and I became husband and wife in February 1983.
It was just a couple of weeks later that Sam and I went out to dinner in Beverly Hills with my manager Joey Stabile and his wife Claudia, who ran my office. The restaurant was La Famiglia, on Rodeo a couple of blocks north of Wilshire. We’d picked it out because we all felt like some Italian food. Who knew that it was Dean’s favorite restaurant?
I spotted him the moment we’d been seated: He was alone in a red-leather booth by the front door. After a moment, I caught his eye and waved. He waved back. I got up and walked over to his table.
My first reaction as I approached was a double take at how much Dean had aged. I know I was no Prince Charming, but my partner had always looked so magnificently handsome and youthful. He was about to turn sixty-six. There are young sixty-sixes and old sixty-sixes, and Dean was definitely the latter. Whether it was the effects of the sun for all those years, or the accumulated sadnesses of his life, or just the genetic luck of the draw, I don’t know. But it saddened me deeply.
“You workin’?” I said, putting on a brave smile.
He laughed at that, and it made him look younger. “You wanna have a drink?” he asked.
“No, I don’t drink,” I told him. “I used to work with a guy that drank all the time and breathed on me—I’ve had all the booze I can take for one lifetime.”
He laughed again. It was all very playful. But at the same time, I felt that I was imposing on him. With age, his reserve had grown. (Mack Gray, the one man who was at all close to Dean in later years, had died in 1981.) Dean could have had almost anybody in the world in that booth with him—a gorgeous girl, Frank, anyone—but he truly wanted to be alone. I touched his arm, gave him a wink, and went back to my table.
Ten minutes later, a waiter brought over a champagne bucket, covered with a cloth napkin. “Compliments of Mr. Martin,” the waiter said.
I finally went to hell.
I removed the napkin and saw six bottles of Diet Coke sitting on ice.
I laughed out loud, not just at the joke—it was classic Dean!—but with a kind of relief. He hadn’t closed me out. I patted Sam on the hand. “Come on,” I told her. “I want you to meet him.”
She hesitated. Sam is deeply sympathetic to others’ feelings, and that’s just one of the reasons I’m so nuts about her. She didn’t want to impose—on Dean’s privacy, on my relationship with him.
But I felt strongly about this. “Come,” I said. “This is important to me.”
We walked over to his table. Just for a second, I went into the Idiot voice: “Thank you for the lovely champagne.”
He laughed, and I had my opening. “Paul, I want you to meet my wife, Sam.”
He looked up at her with a grin. “I always knew you’d marry a guy.”
We all laughed. We stood there chatting for a couple of minutes, and it was nice, but once more I picked up on his wish to be by himself. We went back to our table.
I couldn’t take my eyes off Dean after that. Staring across the restaurant, trying to get my mind around how much he had changed. A million images of the old days, when we were both kids, flashed through my brain.... Christ! Don’t get old, I thought.
What’s the alternative?
As we ate, I watched him eat. It’s a very strange thing to watch someone you know well eating alone. I tried my hardest not to be sad, but the feelings washed over me. One thing I did notice: Dean had an Old-Fashioned glass in front of him, and it sat there, full, for his whole meal. He never touched it.
Then, one day not long after that, I found—it both surprised me and didn’t surprise me at all—that I missed him. So I called him up. As simple as that.
“Hey, Paul—how ya doin’?” I said, bright and chipper.
“Hey, pally. How are you?”
“What, you forgot my fuckin’ name already?”
We had a few laughs, chatted for a few minutes. Nothing important—it was more about the music than the words. It was easy, and lovely, and it didn’t last one second more than it had to.
So every couple of weeks afterward, I called him again. It went on that way for four years.
Dean had seven children, and he loved them all dearly, but Dean Paul Martin Jr., his second son and his first child with Jeannie, was the apple of his eye. Dino, as they called him, truly was a golden boy. Blond like his mother, and sharing both his parents’ good looks, he was a talented musician (like my son Gary, he’d had a successful rock recording career in the mid-sixties) and a brilliant athlete—for a time he played tennis on the professional circuit. He also did some acting in the movies and on television; s
till, it wasn’t any picnic trying to succeed in that profession as Dean Martin’s son. In his mid-thirties, Dino was working hard to make his own way in the world.
And Dean admired the hell out of that. He could tolerate very few people, and he admired almost nobody, but God, he looked up to that boy. To top it off, Dino was a captain in the Air National Guard: He flew jet fighters every weekend. To Dean, who wasn’t crazy about air travel, that seemed amazingly brave.
On March 20, 1987, Dean Jr. was on maneuvers over the San Bernardino Mountains when his F4-C Phantom went off the radar screen. The wreckage of the plane was found five days later. Dino and his weapons officer had been flying into a blizzard in white-out conditions. When they lost radio contact with air-traffic control, they crashed into Mount Gorgonio.
I was playing at the Bally with Sammy when I heard about Dino’s death. I immediately flew to L.A. for the funeral. I walked into the back of the church at the beginning of the service, and I stayed there. Dean didn’t know I was present, and I didn’t want him to.
Afterward, I said to Sam, “Honey, it’s just a matter of time. Dean’s gone. That boy was the most important thing he had in his life.”
Early that evening, Greg Garrison, Dean’s television producer and a friend of both of ours, phoned to say that he’d seen me at the funeral and told Dean. Greg said that Dean was so touched that I’d been there. What he didn’t say, but what I understood, was how moved Dean had been that I’d come and gone in anonymity. Going unnoticed has never been my strong suit. But I felt it was a gesture I owed to both my partner and Dino.
Late that night, after my second show at Bally’s—it was about three A.M.—the phone in my dressing room rang. The voice on the line was instantly recognizable.
“Hey, Jer.”
In our phone relationship of the last few years, I’d always been the one to place the call. That was just the way it went with Dean, and I never minded, but this night was very different.